Mean Editor is a lean-and-mean WYSIWYM editor based on WYMeditor. It is meant to complement traditional editing, instead of implementing the full Mediawiki language. Two versions are available: see below for details.

It provides non-technical and inexperienced users a way to contribute to a wiki while being:

easy to use

history-friendly

fair to existing hand-written code and edits

semantically correct, encouraging correct use of markup

The editor is quite easy to port to new versions of MediaWiki, and is currently also in the MediaWiki SVN, but we have currently discontinued updates. Feel free to contact us if you are interested in the project.

Advanced users and administrators do not need a visual editor. They just need it not to interfere with the code they already know and love. Moreover, expressing the full wikitext syntax in a visual editor is probably impossible.

We focused on the "easy", non technical, parts of a wiki. We estimate that a lot of wiki content consists of simple paragraphs of text with links, references, images and a little formatting. This is where inexperienced editors can provide valuable contributions with little effort.

We designed MeanEditor for an external project, but we kept existing wikis (for example, Wikipedia) in mind. We hope the existing communities will find MeanEditor a good tool they can trust, rather than find annoying.

If no advanced features are needed, MeanEditor is a good choice even for a single-editor wiki.

based on the current WYMeditor 0.5 beta. Supports all modern browsers (Internet Explorer support used to have many issues, please verify the current status on the WYMeditor project site). Tested on MediaWiki 1.16.

MeanEditor is best described as "A quick and dirty hack with a couple of interesting properties". It supports only a very limited subset of the wiki language, but does its job right. (Well, it tries.)

It is an adaptation of WYMeditor, a semantic editor for strict XHTML. This encourages users to think in terms of what they mean, instead of trying to change what they see.

MeanEditor refuses to modify markup it does not understand and strives to preserve the original page intact. Ideally, edits made with MeanEditor should be indistinguishable from manual edits. If anything, a visual editor for Wikipedia should not create additional work for administrators.

In the current version, redundant whitespace is sometimes removed and some characters are replaced with numerical entities. Other than that, MeanEditor leaves a very clean diff.

MeanEditor used to require disabling hashed upload directories to handle images, but thanks to Ken Bateman it now works out of the box.

It appears that sometimes HTML-style <h1> tags are inserted instead of wikitext titles. I'm having trouble reproducing the problem, if you run into the bug please report it.

On IE6, wikilink detection can fail

Complex Unicode handling is untested

Preview passes HTML to the editor. We try to convert it to wikicode as soon as possible, but some hooks or preview functions may be confused. If you are in the middle of a visual editing and something strange happens, we revert to traditional editing. There might be cases in which you get HTML instead of wikicode and have to start over. This should be a very rare case, but existing extensions need reviewing.

We got rid of most hardcoded paths, but we still require installation in extensions/MeanEditor. Also, short paths are untested (they should work, though).

However, it might be possible to create a malicious page in wikitext and have MeanEditor create dangerous HTML. Our regular expressions are simple, but they should be carefully reviewed before deploying.

Right now MeanEditor does not use the Mediawiki parser. This is what ensures MeanEditor doesn't do silly things with markup it does not understand.

We recognize our simple regular expressions will ultimately become too limited. A good solution would be to integrate an "editor mode" in the parser. The "editor mode" should generate semantic XHTML targeted to a WYSIWYM editor.

MeanEditor used to require a patch to EditPage.php. To re-use an HTML editor, we need to add XHTML input support to MediaWiki. The current CustomEditor hook requires one to duplicate some functionality of EditPage.php, although the situation has improved a lot with the MediaWiki 1.16 release. Due to user feedback, we currently maintain the patch internally and ship ready-to-use code, we still plan to propose the patch to the Mediawiki developers someday. For now, we keep an eye on the Usability Survey.